Neomeme

I’ve recently been playing around with Profilactic, a digital life aggregator that attempts to connect all of your digital contributions in one place. It creates pretty cool little mashups of all of your contributions to social media sites in a single interface. Your contributions, or anyone else’s in fact. OpenID is approaching the same problem from a different perspective by offering to synchronize all of your online profiles to a single username and password that works anywhere. Both are moving towards synchronization and unification of the myriad online identities we have all accumulated over the years, one username and login to rule them all. To paraphrase Stephen Colbert, why do you hate the Internet, OpenID? Read more »

For those of you that haven’t seen it, this is an amazingly cool(and geeky!) watch:

Basically, instead of using hands and numbers to tell time, you simply count the number of lit-up segments. It looks very alien-like and futuristic. But the most wonderful thing about this watch is this: it transcends culture and knowledge. A child, or an alien without any prior knowledge of mathematics can easily learn to use this watch- “The day is divided into 24 parts. Each time one of these lights up, another part has passed”. This cross-cultural, obscure little watch raises a lot of thoughts about other technologies like, say, the Internet. Unlike this watch, the Internet is much more monocultural. Why are URLs all in English and not Unicode? Why are 19 of the world’s 100 most popular websites Google? Read more »

Not long ago, I blogged about my proposal for large corporations to quickly gather feedback from large groups of users and at the same time increase transparency by soliciting comments in an open forum with Digg-like voting. Yesterday, Yahoo implemented that exact system. I applaud Yahoo for this large shift towards greater openness with users, and I hope other major corporations follow suit. Consumers get their voice heard, Yahoo gets free market research, and everyone wins. And I applaud synchronicity for this almost too weird coincidence.

Unfortunately, Mr. Yahoo Bigshot obviously didn’t read my other post about how the average voter shouldn’t be trusted with anything(for those of you who are the average voter, the main point is in nice big bold letters in the middle of the post). As a result, instead of hailing what is arguably a very major step in applying Web 2.0 to market data, most of the comments on the Yahoo announcement range from “I hope you get sued big time” to “This is a rip off of Digg” to the far more eloquent “The cheapest ripp(sic) of(sic, again) I saw in a long time!” . Okay, so Yahoo used similar-looking buttons and basic layout. But, kids, can we please look beyond that and consider the concept? Yahoo is using Digg-style voting for a completely different purpose! Saying that Yahoo is just ripping off Digg is like saying American Idol is ripping off the American democratic process and we should sue Ryan Seacrest with some tactical nuclear strikes immediately.

One Yahoo user with intelligence of truly Einsteinean proportions took some time off from studying string theory to contribute the following insight:

“Who would be defending a ripoff of Digg for Yahoo! Autos other than Yahoo employees? Do you think there’s actual Yahoo! fans out there defending this? LOL C’mon guys.”

For the record, I am not a Yahoo! employee, and yet I like them, a lot. The’ve really taken major steps away from the “web portal” position, and have made some very intelligent and exciting acquisitions in the Web 2.0 sphere like Flickr, del.icio.us, and MyBlogLog. Their downfall in this case was that they were a bit too open, failing to moderate comments that were flat out idiotic. If these are the kinds of people who will be critiquing Yahoo in their voting feedback system, perhaps the wisdom of crowds they are relying on is not so wise after all.

As any advertiser will tell you, there are three magic words in the English language: You, Free and Sex. I’ve recently written a post about innovative ways to use Wikipedia. Guess what the most popular outgoing link by a wide margin was? Did people want to use Wikipedia for scholarly study or discovering new music? Of course not. The most popular outgoing links, by far were these two:

The only one that came close was Radioactive Diderot, which would also make a great name for a blog or a punk rock band. I guess I can’t blame you guys- who wouldn’t want to use Wikipedia to look for social, user-generated, community-editable Web 2.0 porn?

Recently I’ve been playing with Searchles, which bills itself as a “social search” site. Basically, instead of bombarding the user with thousands of search results, as Google or Yahoo do, Searchles lets you narrow your search down to specific tags or even to pages bookmarked by users you have added as friends. Recently, they have added the ability to search for pages bookmarked by members of certain groups. The ability to search by tags or groups conveniently For example, if you wanted to search for Ruby the programming language and not ruby the gemstone, you would run a search for Ruby with either the tag “programming” or constrained to the “Web 2.0″ group. By allowing only user-submitted pages into its index, Searchles effectively cuts down on junk and spam, but pays the price of a small, incomplete index(I couldn’t find anything for ruby the gemstone even if I wanted to). Though the practical application of the site may be limited at its present state, particularly with del.icio.us search providing much of the same functionality(except groups) with a much larger index, the idea is nonetheless intriguing. And the idea, the idea behind Searchles and del.icio.us and Digg and every other “social ____” site simultaneously defines Web 2.0 and returns full circle to 1994. A bit of background: Read more »

I am incredibly excited about Barack Obama. Not because of his intelligence, integrity, or views- although I endorse him fully, this is not a political blog, but because his campaign is arguably the first presidential campaign ever to truly embrace the Internet, and not just the Internet- Web 2.0. Today, Obama posted a video preview of the announcement he will be making tomorrow, undoubtedly a presidential bid. The online flv video by itself is not terribly exciting- Hillary Clinton posts webcasts and will be launching a blog. Undoubtedly, campaign advisors are telling candiates that that there blog thing is mainstream enough to get votes, particularly young voters. But now, the Obama campaign has taken it to the next level. Here’s what he said: Read more »

I am usually pretty tolerant of seemingly crazy marketing schemes, startup ideas and the like. But the latest offering from Facebook takes the cake. They have just introduced a feature that lets you send “gifts” to your friends, like candy hearts and Teddy bears. “Wow, that’s pretty cool” you might say. “I’d like to click a button on Facebook and have some candy automatically mailed to my girlfriend on Valentine’s Day”, you might think. Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg would only scoff “Where have you been these past ten years? This is a social network! Web 2.0! The Information Superhighway! Physical gifts are the way of the past! Digital gifts are the future!”. “And what are these digital gifts”, you may ask? Are they some form of useful intellectual property? A music download or an ebook? Or perhaps an in-game item I can use to advance my character?”. Silly you. Of course not. These Facebook gifts are PICTURES! That’s right, for the low, low price of $1 you can send your sweetheart a PICTURE of a teddy bear. Furthermore, a PICTURE of a teddy bear that she can already view for free if she just clicks on the goddamn gifts link! The only thing you’re paying for is for the same exact picture to appear on her wall!

Is Facebook really hurting in the wallet so much that they have to resort to such idiotic schemes? They are underestimating their audience. I don’t think even a Myspace user would pay a dollar to show a picture of toilet paper on his wall.

You probably know Wikipedia as the world’s largest encyclopedia, suitable for research on most any topic. You know you can look up terms, but what you may not know is that Wikipedia features a ton of other information that can do a lot more than help you with that research paper. Wikipedia can also be a: Read more »

I have just come across Halfbakery, a social ideas site. It is essentially an idea bank, where users submit various ideas they have for anything…products, services, even social conventions. Other users then comment on and vote on the ideas. How many times has a quick idea for “the next big thing” or an improvement on a current thing popped into your head? With sites like Halfbakery you can now share these ideas with others instead of letting them die out. What’s most interesting is that Halfbakery seems like a very cutting-edge,Web 2.0-ish site. And yet, it has been around since 2000, years before user-generated content became such a big deal. Read more »

In a final blow to its most active contributors Digg has stopped publicizing the rank of its top users. Now, Digg rank is not shown anywhere, even a user’s profile. This means that unofficial Digg rankings like this one are, for all intents and purposes, broken. This is a further step Digg is taking to appeal to the majority at the expense of its core crowd, perhaps seeking to dispel the notion that only an elite few can succeed on Digg and draw in a wider user base. To me, this smells like acquisition, acquisition,acquisition. Either Kevin Rose is getting ready to pitch Digg to a media giant, probably News Corp, or acquisition talks are already well underway, and Digg is responding to pressure from the buyer. Either way, expect a shakeup in the social news scene quite soon. Read more »